The Manor, the Plowman, and the Shepherd: Agrarian Themes and Imagery in Late Medieval and Early Renaissance English Literature by Ordelle G. Hill (review)

REVIEWS crucial vision ofGod and goes on to analyze the failure ofConscience in the last two passus, which continue, and even intensify, the poem's series of defeats.In particular he traces the similarities between Dobest and the Visio, noting the crucial differences (the roles of Piers and Conscience) as the results ofthe discoveries made in the Vita. I like his discussion ofredde quod debes, which roughly follows R.W. Frank's lead in keeping it within the context of the parable of the debtor, and so seeing it as an injunction to be charitable.But this world seems fundamentally flawed.No longer are "conformity to the moral conscience and possession of the virtues ...pre­ conditions for pardon" (p.129); "the Church is merely an institution ex­ pected to suffice in the absence of belief" (p. 132).Even remorse and suffering, the two guides to Will in the Vita, are undermined by the Friars and by Need.Only an awareness in the Conscience of God's divine love as knight, king, and conqueror can offer hope.And in the last chapter Har­ wood shows that Piers himself possessed such knowledge at the moment when he tore the pardon, when "suffering itself has become cognitive" (p.138).In conformity with his almost Calvinist interpretation of Lang­ land, he sees this moment as the point where Piers's complacency is shat­ tered, and he realizes that God has "bou3te" him too.Clearly salvation depends on grace, whether experienced as a vision ofGod or as the "sudden blow" at which a Christian realizes his dependence on Him.Harwood's view of the poem is at least dramatic, though it is, eventually, too personal to have converted me. ANNA BALDWIN Cambridge University OR.DELLE G.HILL.The Manor, the Plowman, and the Shepherd: Agrarian Themes and Imagery in Late Medieval and Early Renaissance English Litera­ ture. Selinsgrove, Pa.: Susquehanna University Press, 1993.Pp.2 57. $42.50. Beginning and ending his text with a meditation on Brueghel's Icarus, Ordelle G.Hill capably argues that Brueghel was ahead of his time in foregrounding the figure of the plowman, for now in the wake of New Historicism in Renaissance and medieval studies, constellated by the names Stephen Greenblatt, Gary Waller, Stephen Knight, and Lee Patter207 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER son, the life of the plowman along with his fellow laborers is getting the attention it deserves for indeed creating the world on which the literature of the period is to a certain extent dependent. Although the subject of this book is in vogue, this is not by any means a trendy cultural critique. In fact, it is a rather traditional, often referentialist, treatment of the history and artistic representation of farming in England from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries. While some readers may look for a more problematized view of history and while others will find the absence of it comforting, both will find this work a most welcome addition to their libraries because of its thorough cataloguing of pastoral and agrarian images, themes, and symbols in the literature under discussion; and for its pictures, charts, and maps, docu­ menting the changing history of agrarian economy; and finally for the exceptional bibliography and notes. In the preface Hill confesses that his book began in the 1950s as a humble attempt to add some footnotes to Piers Plowman on the history of plowing. The resulting study offers an interesting star-crossed history of the plowman and the shepherd. The manorial system and the farmers attached to the manor began to fragment in the fourteenth century, and as a result the plowmen either became poorer, sometimes rebels associated with thugs (pace the Peasants' Revolt), or became somewhat prosperous franklins, providing they were able to manage successfully in the new cash economy and leasing of enclosed lands. As the fifteenth and sixteenth cen­ turies played out the changes in agrarian economy, however, the plowman began to disappear from the literature as a significant figure, and the shep­ herd took his place in the pastoral literature of the Renaissance. Since the chapter on Piers is the heart of the book, Hill precedes that discussion with a...